LaKeisha

A profile. LaKeisha has these big fawn eyes, and an easy smile full of perfect little teeth. She is courteous and cooperative, and I have never in my life caught her talking. This is probably because every time I hear a whisper or a disruptive shuffle from her side of the room, my eyes dart over to find her batting her eyelids, looking as innocent as a baby dove. Nothing says, "You can't prove I'm guilty" like LaKeisha's smile.

I am the teacher, but sometimes I'm pretty sure it's LaKeisha who is running my classroom.

RaShawn

I’m still figuring out this whole regular-blog-schedule thing. For now it looks like I will be posting every weekday (read: Sunday through Thursday nights.) The tricky bit here is that I’ll have to remember something about Friday’s school day on Monday. And fortunately, nothing remarkable really happened on Friday. So in light of that, I will take this moment to share what might be my favorite student moment of all time.

RaShawn had to go to the bathroom, and he asked me to sign his hall pass. He had filled it out; all I needed to do was initial. When he brought it to me, I grabbed the nearest writing implement–in this case, an Expo dry-erase marker–and signed the pass. RaShawn took a moment, silently looking from me to the marker to my signature, and back to me again. “That’s pretty ghetto, Ms. E,” he remarked. “You sure you ain’t got some black in you?”

Oops. Looks like Student of the Day isn’t always going to be PC. But hey, I didn’t say it.

Shaquille

Classroom-management-problem-solvers, take note! We have, at my school, what is called a no-jone zone in which students are prohibited from insulting one another. But for some reason, telling a fourteen-year-old to "just be nice" yeilds... about as much fruit as you would expect. My solution to the mean kids in my 5/6 period class is The Nice Paper. In essence, it is this: when a student insults someone else, the insulter has to write five complete sentences about how he or she admires the insultee.

My favorite so far has been from Shaquille. He wrote, "Chandra has great self-of-steam."

You may be wondering what we are teaching these children.

Apparently... not too much.

Fernando

"How long is a paragraph?" I ask my students.

They chorus, "At least five sentences."

I don't like these strict, unrealistic rules of writing (who, in the real world, has ever written a five-paragraph essay?) but you have to set some kind of standard. Fernando knows the rules all too well. This is his paragraph responding to the question, "What animal represents you?"

I'm like a lion. Because I have pride and stuff. And also cause i'm strong and stuff . Im also protectant and I cant thint of anything else. Cool I quess I don't know yet.

Count 'em. Five sentences.

An Introduction

I am a masochist. By which I mean that I teach eighth graders. When I tell people what I do they usually cringe or bless me, and occassionally they say, “You must have some really interesting stories.” If you only knew…

This afternoon, Dayton reported to my room directly after his Spanish I class. Our conversation went as follows.

Dayton: “Hola, profesora”
Me: “Hola, Dayton, como estas?”
Dayton: “…Ocho!”

And that, esentially, is what student of the day is all about. My kids do and say weird things, and I write about these events while making questionable punctuation choices. For the record, I’m fabricating names because, like I said, I’m a teacher. I can’t afford a lawsuit.